Naoe

Daughter of Fujibayashi Nagato, keeper of one of Iga's shinobi clans and of a box worth more than the province, Naoe survived Oda Nobunaga's 1579 invasion with a wound, a name-list, and the discovery that the raiders who took the box answered to no daimyo at all — a masked league, the Shinbakufu, steering Japan's unification from behind it. Her hunt for them is the spine of Shadows: patient, rooftop-and-shadow work in the classical mode, sharpened by grief and gradually tempered by the strangest ally the era could offer — Nobunaga's African samurai, whose code of open honor argues with her creed of shadows all the way to the same targets.